Have you ever asked yourself a question why we use icons in our designs? We won’t say something new now, as all of us know that users don’t start reading the content immediately. First of all they scan it for visually attractive elements in order to make their verdict: whether your website is worth their attention or not. That’s why experienced designers place a kind of traps for visitors’ eyes here and there, like icons, for instance.

It’s a well known fact that text broken into smaller paragraphs is much more digestible for reader, and here icons can serve as great text styling elements.

Actually, icons can be found everywhere on the web page: they decorate navigation menus, search boxes, block quotes and web forms. Icons make your content more understandable even without reading, sometimes they even replace the text. This phenomenon today can be frequently observed in buttons design.

What is the main goal of using icons?

The ultimate aim of icons application in web design is to help users absorb and process information without intension but with maximum efficiency.

Here is a general, rough list of places where you can arrange your small or large helpers (the size is not that important) to draw users’ attention and make their online experience much better:

1. Various lists. Otherwise your enumeration falls under the risk of looking boring.

2. Drawing attention to new or cool, unique features in your web application.

3. As an invitation (call-to-action) to try out something new or do what you want the user to do.

4. Logos. Icons are simply ideal for logo design.

5. Titles and headers. They stand out much better when supplied with icons.

6. Schematic explanation of the paragraph point preceding it.

7. Separation of long text abstracts.

Needless to say that icons should uphold the general website design style, be it classical, minimalist, flat, grunge, etc. Remember that carefully selected icons make your website look friendlier, more inviting, understandable and professional. There are no small details in web design. Thinking about them you show the user how pedantic you are in everything that relates to your work. Sometimes even the tiny icons can add unique charm and personal touch to your website. You can experiment with icons of different sizes and places of their location to raise readers’ interest. Creativity is always a winning tactics. Actually, there is only one restriction in using them: no matter how beautiful single icons are, they should seamlessly blend with the rest of the layout, otherwise, your website will look messy and unprofessional, as a set of random elements.

For those who can’t call him/herself an expert in icon drawing, we offer a set of simple, effective tutorials, teaching how to draw different types of icons in Adobe Illustrator. This way, you will be able to create absolutely unique icons that suit your individual web design needs. So, here they are: icon design Adobe Illustrator tutorials.

More and more people want to launch their own websites. Nevertheless, just a small fraction of them are acquainted with coding and web development well enough to do it independently. But still, there is a way, if you don’t want to waste money on hiring specialists and therefore depend on them. I mean SaaS – Software as a Service, when you can use some website engine without buying hosting services, downloading website engine, etc.

In terms of creating website one of the best SaaS solutions is certainly Shopify. It’s a simple-to-use and effective service, which gives an opportunity to create online store without any knowledge in coding. Besides, it exempts users from activity related to hosting. I don’t want go into details about all the features, because it’s quite quickly to register for you – and then you will get 14-day trial to check many of the benefits and options, available in Shopify.

Design is neither an invention nor a discovery that could happen by accident! It has to be backed by a process, should be thought of thoroughly, planned and properly managed. Conventionally, a design team or designer is responsible for the design management, which is included in the design phase. Designs in agile projects are tightly integrated with delivery; hence it is actively involved with design management. Design could be a bottleneck if it is considered separately to the rest of the team with different priorities and schedules.

…“Step into Christmas, let’s join together
We can watch the snow fall forever and ever
Eat, drink and be merry come along with me
Step into Christmas, the admission’s free”…

(Step into Christmas by Elton John – we decided to begin our post with the words from this song instead of traditional Christmas carol and hope you have nothing against our ploy).

Are you ready to step into Christmas with us? We’ll have a good time, make no doubt about it!

Let’s retreat from rigorous religious connotation of the holiday, commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ into Christian World, as we are not sure about the name of God or the numen our readers believe in. Actually, the word Christmas derives from “Christ-Mass”, which means a celebration at the solar solstice of winter for the rebirth of the solar force in matter. Christians call that solar force Christ, Persians – Ormuz or Ahura Mazda, Hindus – Krishna, Egyptians – Osiris, Chinese – Fu Xi, Greeks – Zeus, Jupiter, the Father of the Gods, Aztecs – Quetzalcoatl, in the Germanic Edda, Baldur is the Christ. As you see, each culture has its own name for God and very similar story of his life, miracles he worked and brutal assassination he undertook. Some of them were referred to millions of years before Christ. So, as our traditions and viewpoints are different, we offer to take God not as an individual now, but as an inconceivable cosmic principle of life-giving energy assimilated within our physical, psychic, somatic and spiritual nature, somewhere within our souls.

So what do we celebrate according to this philosophy?

The holiday of Christ Mass is a celebration of the birth of the solar force within us, a feat made possible by living the teachings given by those who already incarnated that force.

But enough with this short historical excursus. We hope you’ve already bought the tickets to your native town? What for? Of course to celebrate the most wonderful, fairy and joyful festival of the year – Christmas, even if your family lives in Australia and you’ll have picnic on the beach with surfing and sunbathing instead of traditional turkey table. We asked you about tickets because from ancient times Christmas was considered a family holiday and it may be a real problem to get to your home town on the 24th of December.

How are you going to celebrate this Christmas? Most likely you are busy with buying presents for your beloved ones, decorating your house with scented candles, glittering lights, huge, thick Christmas tree, etc. It’s a good time to show your love and care to friends and relatives.

In our turn, we couldn’t leave our respected readers without a kind of Christmas present, aimed to raise their holiday spirit. Try to guess what is it? Today it’s a sparkling cocktail of funny, cute, free Christmas wallpapers and movie posters. Yes, your computer also deserves a small gift. Open your soul to Christmas wonders, tune to festive mood and don’t forget to change your desktop wallpaper. It’s free!

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Christmas Movie Posters

It’s a good tradition to get involved into charity projects. It’s time to think about people whom you can help and make their lives a bit brighter. Are you ready to support charity organization? Free Responsive HTML5 Template will help you start a site for any charity organization, do it quickly and without any costs. Besides, it will not take you any extra efforts to customize this design to meet the needs of some particular organization.

Most charity website are created in calm color scheme. As you see, this one looks different. Multicolored blocks (Metro style trend) set a positive tone and welcome more visitors to the site. By the way, colors are used for visual division of content part here.

HTML Plus JS animation enlivens the information and make its browsing more captivating. Back-to-top button and drop down menu are for comfortable navigation. All promo videos of the company can be easily embedded on Videos page.

The site based on this theme will be equally good displayed on various handheld devices, ‘cause the theme is responsive.

Let a site for non-profit organization be your charity project this Christmas. Get this theme and use it as its solid basis.

Inky Deals is one of the leading deals websites in the design community, with an extended family of more than 300,000 design enthusiasts. It’s the place to go if you want to buy premium resources at unbeatable prices, whether you’re a graphic or web designer, developer, or business owner looking to improve yourself and your work.

They’re the only deals website who offer a 200% money back guarantee on every product. This means that if you’re not happy with it, you get your money back and you also get to keep the product.

471 Premium Design Resources for Free

Because Inky (the lovable little ink blob and mascot of Inky Deals) and his team enjoy giving back to the community, they’ve created a huge free web design bundle: 471 Premium Design Resources for Free value $519, which you can find exclusively on Inky Deals.Read More

Shared and dedicated servers are the two buzz words in the online business world. The common issue for the business owners while planning to launch their e commerce site is to choose whether shared or dedicated hosting. Are you a business owner at a crossroads now? Be sure while taking deciding on particular hosting solution as it affect how your business will run on the web space in the future.

People of the 20th century thought that in the future we will wear multifunctional costumes, eat vitamins and fly on the weekend into the outer space. We can watch it in old sci-fi books and films. Indeed, it’s quite funny to understand how retro-futuristic forecasts were far from the reality. In fact they are even contrary to these views, because we, people of future, who invented high technologies and internet, have a certain reference before the aesthetics of the previous century. This appears in fashion, in art etc. And of course, in web design: vintage is still in trend, however being influenced by other more fresh tendencies such as skeuomorphism.

Typography, the considerable part of web design, is not the exception. Not so long ago, in the 2000’s, there was a boom of handwritten fonts. Now the fashion leans toward more severe typewriter-like fonts, which bring a strong oldschool flavor to the style in addition to skeuomorphic associations with typewriting process, sound of chattering keys, smell of paper and oil. Well, I think you know all of these once you are on this page. So I won’t drag the feet, and would like to represent the best typewrite-like fonts existing on the web.

As the internet continues to evolve, online marketing practices are along for the ride. We’ve made big advances since the internet’s first banner ad, all the way back in 1994:

Banner ads still have a place in modern marketing, but they’re much more than static images. They’re trackable, targeted by audience interest, and more dynamic than we ever could have imagined back in the days of Boys II Men.

Among all the bells and whistles of online marketing, automation has risen as a popular trend.

If you’re not familiar with marketing automation, it’s simply the process of building out marketing assets and campaigns ahead of time, and letting them execute themselves as prospects and leads enter your sales funnel.

The sky has always accompanied humanity throughout the history. Ancient mythology stated about the indissoluble connection of the sky and the Earth, where we all live in. Ancient Greeks supposed Uranus, the god of the sky, was a brother and a husband of Gaia, the mother-Earth. Sky personified active, male and spiritual aspect of life as a harmonic supplement to passive, female and material aspect. Artists and poets of all times were inspired by the beauty of the gorgeous celestial spaces that seemed endless behind the horizon.

So it’s not surprising that artist of more modern form, such as web designers, also often use it in their works. Here and there throughout the web we can meet websites that use sky elements in their designs. Of course, nothing can fully transmit the magnificence of the sky – and probably therefore we love the art that just gives a hope of reality, but not the reality. However some web designers can be very close to that – and we value exactly such feature of propinquity to the reality. Below I would like to present the digest of the best celestial web designs for your inspiration and for evolution of modern internet symbolism. Enjoy.